“When your brother becomes poor and he slips down among you, you must come to his aid.”
– Leviticus 25:35
From Cotati to Palo Alto, from Colma gardens to Oakland senior centers, Bay Area congregations large and small are working to make the world a better place.
And not just their own world — places as far-flung as Kenya and Darfur are benefiting from local Jewish social welfare projects.
While the Bay Area is certainly a hotbed of social action, giving tzedakah and the notion of tikkun olam (repairing the world) are fundamental aspects of Judaism that many religious and secular Jews all over the world embrace as part of their identity.
“You can meet people who are Jewish through family heritage who never step into a synagogue, but who see social action as a part of their identity as a Jew,” said Mark Fickes, co-chair of the Social Action Committee at Temple Sinai in Oakland.
Temple Sinai, a congregation of over 920 members, runs a variety of organized social action programs and partners with local organizations for food drives and a book literacy project. Last year, approximately 13 tons of food was gathered through Sinai’s fall food drive, and the congregation raised over $20,000 for Thanksgiving turkeys through the annual Alameda Food Bank Turkey Drive.
“When you look at Leviticus, it speaks explicitly to the notion that it is our obligation to care for and allow there to be food for the hungry,” Fickes said. “We should not be unkind to the stranger, because we were strangers from the land of Eygpt.”
Cotati’s Congregation Ner Shalom, a 90-member Reconstructionist synagogue, has not let its comparatively small size get in the way of helping its community.
Ner Shalom’s administration and congregants have offered a sweetheart lease to the Jewish Community Free Clinic, a nonprofit organization that offers free medical care to the uninsured without regard to ethnicity, race or religion. This lease will cost the clinic $1 per year for 30 years, allowing them to build a permanent home on the site of the Ner Shalom parking lot.
The new building will allow the clinic to expand to five weekly clinics, provide 4,000 free medical visits to uninsured patients and will include new services such as in-office surgical procedures and specialized clinics. There are plans to begin construction this fall.
Congregation Kol Emeth in Palo Alto, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue, has ongoing programs including an annual Mitzvah Day, collecting toiletries and clothing for the homeless, food for people who are ill, and environment-improvement projects. The congregants also support the Pskov Jewish Community in Russia through various fund-raisers, and participate in the “goat project,” where they collect money to buy goats for low-income families in Kenya.
“We actualize an idea of mitzvah in the life of the society where we live,” said Eugene Fukshansky, chair of the Social Action Committee at Kol Emeth.
Actualizing mitzvah by using direct social action is the primary interest of Jonathan Stern, social action chair at Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley. He feels that working together to create social change is important in Jewish communities outside of Israel because reaching out and helping others while developing one’s community provides a deep spiritual experience.
“I believe strongly in direct and local action,” Stern said. “It’s not that I don’t believe in the political or theoretical part of social action, but for me the most satisfying part and what makes a difference is the direct action, and that’s a community building act.”
Helping build a community outside of a congregation is part of the challenge for social action chairs, but building a volunteer network within a congregation has to occur first. Some social action heads find it difficult to encourage continued participation in volunteer programs.
“It’s hard to move beyond your base,” Stern said. “A very high proportion of people in most congregations are dedicated to the ideas of social action — it’s getting it on to their radar screen. Getting people to commit is always difficult, and making it clear how people can contribute is tricky.”
Netivot Shalom has a wide-array of ongoing social action programs: cooking food for the homeless, monthly Shabbat service at the Claremont House senior center in Oakland, the Jewish Literary Project, and other one-time social-action activities such as blood drives and speaker presentations.
The congregation will kick off a new grant-based program for children in kindergarten through second grade. This program will teach students about social action by incorporating volunteerism as a fundamental part of the monthly activity schedule.
San Francisco’s large Reform congregation, Emanu-El , also has many social action programs aimed at getting congregants involved.
On top of a series of food drives, a literacy project, Darfur education projects and environmental activism, the congregation continues to add new volunteer programs. It recently joined the San Francisco Organizing Project’s BaySO initiative, where social action heads learn about faith-based organizing.
The synagogue is currently recruiting volunteers to help grow vegetables in the Pe’ah Garden at their cemetery in Colma for the San Francisco Food Bank. Last year they donated 23,000 pounds of food.
Adolescent programs at Emanu-El heavily reflect the congregation’s dedication to social action. Ariana Estoque, director of adolescent education, says that there are many volunteer opportunities for teens, including the Mitzvah Corps program for seventh-graders. Students in the Mitzvah Corps volunteer at various organizations in San Francisco.
Last month, Estoque and five Emanu-El students joined a small group of Bay Area volunteers in a social-action trip to New Orleans called “Teens Take Action,” to volunteer their time and help in the still-recovering city that was hit hard by last year’s hurricanes.
“The definition of being Jewish is helping to create a better world and taking on as many mitzvot as possible,” said Estoque, who imparts her social action philosophy on the teenage congregants at Emanu-El. “Life is not fulfilling if you cannot help out others.”